June 21 (Bloomberg) -- Officers shot to death 13 people who
attacked a police station in China’s northwestern province of
Xinjiang today, the official Xinhua News Agency reported today,
citing the local government.

“Mobsters” rammed the building with a truck and set off
explosives before being killed, Xinhua said. No civilians were
hurt and three policemen were slightly injured in the attack in
Yecheng county, according to the report.

China started a year-long campaign against terrorism in
Xinjiang, a region beset by tension between the ethnic Uighur
minority and Han Chinese, after a series of explosions killed 39
people and injured 94 on May 22. President Xi Jinping pledged to
punish violence and “spare no effort” to maintain stability in
the region.

The campaign will “make full use of political and legal
force,” including the military and armed police, focusing on
religious-extremist groups, terrorist training camps and illicit
manufacturing of guns and explosives, Xinhua said.

Xinjiang is home to more than 10 million Uighurs, a mostly
Muslim Turkic people who have long resented living under Chinese
rule. Ethnic riots in 2009 in Urumqi, the provincial capital,
left 197 people dead and more than 1,700 injured, according to
state-run media.

A Chinese court sentenced three people to death this month
after convicting them of planning a fatal car crash near
Beijing’s Tiananmen Square last year that was blamed on
separatists, China Central Television said. Flags representing
the East Turkestan Islamic Movement were found in a jeep used by
the attackers, state media reported.